Your calendar app integrates with your email app. So when you create a calendar event and want to invite Bob to it, you can use your email contacts to find Bob. When you send the invite, it goes by email from your email system to Bob's. When Bob opens it, his email app asks him if he wants to add the event to his calendar.
Your calendar app and Bob's calendar app never talk to each other directly, but you're still able to invite Bob to an event. Your calendar only talks to your email. Your email talks to your email service, which talks to Bob's email service. Bob's email client talks to Bob's email service and then to Bob's calendar.
This is actually good. It means that anyone can switch to a different email or calendar app and all they have to do is update their contacts. People can use Hotmail or Gmail or Microsoft or self-hosted email, and integrate whatever calendar they like alongside it.
There's no protocol for different calendar apps to send one another invites directly. They use email for that, which means they need an email integration. Email has the advantage of having been standardized back in the '80s and '90s, with only a few minor modifications since then (mostly for spam prevention). So different companies' email systems have to work together. Calendars just layer on top of that compatibility.
To be clear, it's really Massachusetts that was founded on sanctimonious theology.
Rhode Island was founded by dissidents who got kicked out of Massachusetts. Pennsylvania's Quakers actually were escaping religious persecution. Virginia was founded on slavery (with a side of religious freedom for the slavers). Georgia was originally going to be anti-slavery. And even old New York was once New Amsterdam.
(Warning, this is probably fanfic. It is not intended as commentary on any particular human political situation, including colonialism, capitalism, communism, North Korea, Israel/Palestine, Native Americans, slavery, civil rights, libertarianism, or Trump. Really, I promise.)
They start out as parasites on our civilization; but they desire independence. Their philosophers believe (unbeknownst to us) that "to live without stealing" would be a desirable accomplishment for their people. They have ideas of both community and property; they have individuality and compassion. They argue with one another over their relationship to humans.
If we knew what was going on with them, we might have the chance to do something ethically competent towards them. But if a situation like this arises, we might not even notice it before exterminating it. Humanity has so much power over our world today that we might not even notice.
One initial problem is that we've been in the habit of fighting rats for millennia. They eat and shit in our food; they dig holes in our walls; we set cats and dogs and traps and poison on them. That's how it's been for a long time.
Another problem is that they know our language, but we don't know theirs. Their ancestors were taught human language as a scientific experiment; after they escaped, they taught their children to read our language, so they could use our gadgets and protect themselves from our traps -- and learn math and science and philosophy from our books.
But the human scientists never learned how to speak Rat. When the uplifted rats escaped, from the scientists' point of view, the experiment was a serious failure -- even contaminating wild rat populations with the modified and trained NIMH rats. The research team tried to contain the failure, then disbanded and went different ways; the idea "there are now rats in the wild capable of human-level civilization" didn't even make the scientific journals, much less the media or policy circles.
In order to come up with an ethically competent response to this situation, we have to first recognize that it's even happening. The rats dragging our electrical lights and books into their nest are doing so not just for nesting but because they want to read; the descendants of city rats are building complex colonies in our national parks because they want to become less dependent on humans.
But who notices new rat behavior first? People with rat-infested houses. Organic farmers who don't use rat poison, whose cats are suddenly getting killed in farm equipment way more often than they used to. Exterminators. Health inspectors.
We're more likely to notice the rats that don't follow Nicodemus (who argued that rats must become independent of humans) than the ones who do. We'd first notice the clever and malicious ones; the ones who mutilate cats, evade traps, invade kitchens, and piss on our books and computers as if they were saying "we really fucking hate you."
Or you're a park ranger. The folks in town tell you the rats are being weird. Some wire and tools and books go missing ... and months later some tripping campers come off the trail and tell you they saw a rat city in the deep woods.
After the fourth set of tripping campers talking about how the crazy city rats went and built their own city in the middle of a national park, you go up there to see it.
Sometimes I pay for games. Sometimes I pirate games. Sometimes I buy actual freakin' movie tickets and sit in a freakin' comfy but chilly movie theater (wear a sweater!) and watch a goddamn mainstream Hollywood comic-book movie. Sometimes I download TV shows off BitTorrent.
I'm pissed at YouTube messing with my adblockers, because when I want to hear cheesy stereotypical pop-rock tunes from my youth, I go to YouTube first because YouTube had a mix of official music videos, remixes, unlicensed amateur covers, nerdy science fiik versions, and instrumental covers by twins playing harps. (And that male-feminist heavy-metal cover of "Surface Pressure" from Encanto.)
But sometimes I sing songs to myself, songs that maybe nobody else remembers -- because the person who taught them to me is dead, and I never heard anyone else sing them, and I haven't taught them to anyone yet.
(And the mixtape got stolen with my Walkman. Still pissed about that.)
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.
Take air, for instance. If you're considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole "town" — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it'd likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.
It's totally unfair, you know. Western audiences have been long conditioned to treat it as a sign of villainy when a dictatorial regime builds secret tunnels under innocuous civilian facilities to hide their terrorist warmongering and torture operations! Government propanganda sources like "James Bond" and "G.I. Joe" have conditioned Western audiences to believe that only the bad guys do that!
(Good guys build their secret underground facilities in places of astonishing natural beauty far from civilians who might be harmed by unexpected explosions.)
You want chess? There's chess. Like, no other game has better software than chess. Lichess is maybe the cleanest goddamn game experience that anyone's ever written in code. There's no bullshit whatsoever. You can just run it and play chess, with the computer or with a human. It's just a game.
The best Go game I can point you to is KGS and it's not as good as Lichess. Which is sad, because Go is awesome.
You want to play a run-around-and-whack-stuff-with-a-sword game? Yeah, buy yourself a Nintendo and play the latest Zelda game. They're good at that. Especially if you have a strong stomach and don't get all pukey when your guy goes flying in the air.
Or you want to play a Dungeons & Dragons game with factions and fights and gnolls and hot drow ladies? Yeah, you go install Steam and play Baldur's Gate 3. It's okay if you didn't play Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Nobody else did either.
Taking something away from the woke journalists & tech activists and giving it to the Nazis? Yeah, if that wasn't the entire point, it certainly was a "nice to have" for Elon.
I'm talking about the necessities of moderation policy.
The things you think it's "suspect" I'm not saying? Those are things I think are obviously true and don't need to be restated. Yes, child abuse is very bad. We know that. I don't need to say it over again, because everyone already knows it. I'm talking specifically about the needs for moderation here.
I'm pointing at the necessary distinction between "you personally morally object to that material" and "that material will cause the law to come down on you and your users and anyone who peers with you".
You should have the ability to keep both of those off your server, but the latter is way more critical.
You'd be surprised by how much of the Internet was built by furries, BDSM folk, and other people whose porn a lot of folks think is weird and icky.
Also, you seem to have misunderstood the gist of my comment, or I wasn't clear enough. The tools to deal with CSAM will of necessity be a lot stronger than content moderation that's driven by users' preferences of what they'd like not to see.
Many of the services you're thinking of don't actually sell user data. They use user data to target ads.
Want to know who actually sells your personal information? You can start with the direct-mail companies that enable postal spam aka "junk mail". They will happily sell you a list of the names and physical mailing addresses of people meeting whatever demographic criteria you choose to name.
If you ask Google or Facebook to disclose to you the locations of (say) African-American women of childbearing age in the Boston area, they will tell you 404 Not Found. But the direct-mail people will sell you a list of their mailing addresses.
Your calendar app integrates with your email app. So when you create a calendar event and want to invite Bob to it, you can use your email contacts to find Bob. When you send the invite, it goes by email from your email system to Bob's. When Bob opens it, his email app asks him if he wants to add the event to his calendar.
Your calendar app and Bob's calendar app never talk to each other directly, but you're still able to invite Bob to an event. Your calendar only talks to your email. Your email talks to your email service, which talks to Bob's email service. Bob's email client talks to Bob's email service and then to Bob's calendar.
This is actually good. It means that anyone can switch to a different email or calendar app and all they have to do is update their contacts. People can use Hotmail or Gmail or Microsoft or self-hosted email, and integrate whatever calendar they like alongside it.